The Color of a Dog Running Away

by Richard Gwyn

  On the morning of the second full day I realised I was coughing up blood, struggled out of bed, wrenching free of a drip solution as I did so, and stumbled into the corridor. I stood there, leaning against the doorway, and coughed some more blood onto the tiled floor. A nurse came towards me, looking worried, and urged me back to bed. I told her that I needed to pee, and she fetched a plastic bottle, re-connected me to the drip, and told me I was not to get out of bed again.

  The following day a doctor came to see me, and I asked her what was wrong with me and if or when I was going to die. She replied, matter-of-fact, that if I had been going to die, I would have done so by now, probably two nights earlier. The manner of her telling me this seemed to put into doubt whether she considered my survival of substantial benefit to humanity at large. Relenting slightly, she then told me that I had pneumonia, but that if I acted in accordance with her instructions, I would get better.

  The room where I lay contained two beds, and for the first few days I was alone. After three days I was allowed to have a bath, in a huge white tub whose taps gushed a voluminous quantity of hot water, allowing a deep soak. I was given regulation pyjamas of the same pale blue that I had seen on Manu on my visit with the Baron. By this time I was able to go for half an hour or more without the oxygen, but if I made any rapid movements my breathing immediately became strained. On the fourth day I could sometimes manage a little more; the sweats had begun to die down, other than at night, and I began to eat the regular hospital meals. I was very hungry.

  The days in hospital were long and passed slowly. I slept badly at night, still subject to vicious sweats and turbulent dreams, but I was able to catch up on sleep during the daytime. After several days’ luxurious solitude, an elderly one-legged man was wheeled in from the operating theatre and lifted onto the room’s other bed. From where I sat in my bed I could read the name chalked on the small board at the top of his: Serafín López López. On his remaining leg the new incumbent lacked a big toe. Serafín López López said very little for the first twelve hours and then began to gurgle like an underground drain. He seemed to be on the way out of this life. His wife came in and sat beside him, looking profoundly miserable. There was also an obese young man whom I took to be a son, and a woman I assumed to be his daughter, who wore exaggerated shoulder pads and the same defiant, washed-out look as the son. I suspected they were waiting for the old man to die, and it crossed my mind that he might well do so at night, alone with me. But the poor fellow’s clenched jaw seemed to indicate that he was in no way ready to give up without a fight.

  Twice in the course of the day two nurses would come and scrub him down, and on the first of these occasions I noticed that apart from missing a leg and the other big toe, he also had an enormous lump on the side of the neck. He urinated through a tube into a plastic bag. The two nurses manipulated him like a rag doll. He seemed accustomed to it all.

  Later in the afternoon one of the nurses was fiddling with my neighbour’s penis, trying to fix it up to his plastic tube with some kind of tape. He started rambling on in his unintelligible way. Who knows, perhaps she had given him an erection. In any case, the nurse wasn’t remotely interested in his complaints. I began thinking about the consequences of human reproduction: the poor old broken man with one leg and his dick strapped up with sticky tape, the fat idiot son and vacuous daughter moping in the corridor outside the room along with the frightened, defeated wife. Feelings of compassion merged with a sense of revulsion. It was impossible to imagine them forty years ago, making plans, babies.

  The highlight of my stay in hospital were the visits paid to me by Dr. Fernández, the physician who had waived my death sentence on the second day. I never learned her first name. The next time she visited, she appeared at the side of the consultant, a courteous but overbearing Catalan named Larios, whose family, I was informed by one of the porters, had made their fortune in the famous brand of gin of that name. Larios was always trailed by a gaggle of students, to whom, after the fashion of senior consultants, he made sharp and laconic observations about the patients’ conditions as though the owners of the bodies he discussed were not actually present.

  Dr. Fernández, however, fitted my ideal of the medical professional. Newly qualified, and with a stupefying seriousness, she examined me rigorously and intimately, usually ending with a reprimand of some kind. She was small and slim, with a crop of dark brown curls and oversize glasses. Her open white coat and short skirt revealed the occasional glimpse of a tanned and athletic body. I began to fantasize about her, and from that point on knew that I was on the mend. Eugenia would probably have commented sardonically that I always wanted women who’d save me from myself, so why break a lifetime’s habit when rescued from death’s door?

  The social life on the large ward outside my door was hectic, with patients receiving a steady flow of anxious and often tearful relatives throughout the day and evening. For this reason I was relieved to be kept in one of the small rooms off the main ward. In the evenings I sometimes sat in the lounge at the far end of the corridor. There was always football on the television, usually inaudible because of the loud conversations and analyses that were conducted over the commentary. The ward also had its share of fatalities. One evening the man in bed 93 started convulsing and abruptly died. Minutes later, an elderly man with whom I had occasionally exchanged a greeting came to my room, trembling with the excitement inspired by the bearing of Bad News.

  “My neighbour in 93 died five minutes ago,” he wheezed. “It was terrible, so quick.” He made the sign of the cross and exited quickly, proceeding to the next room on his self-ordained mission as the Messenger of Death.

  Another night a man was brought in strapped to a trolley, screaming and cursing. He was put into bed 111, in a small room like my own, a little further down the corridor. He continued his ranting for two nights and a day, enraged, splenetic, as his body was forced through the horror of delirium tremens and withdrawal.

  The day after this lunatic’s sudden disappearance, when Serafín had been trolleyed off somewhere and I had complained of a particularly acute pain in my liver, Dr. Fernández whacked me on the side with the flat of her hand and asked, “Does that hurt?”

  I winced with the pain, and groaned.

  “Yes. Of course it does.”

  She glared at me through her spectacles.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “No.”

  There was, in fact, a bar in the basement of the hospital, used by staff as well as patients and their visitors. In theory, it would have been possible for me to drink there, but on the two occasions I visited the bar, I had merely taken a mineral water. Dr. Fernández made a clicking sound and looked at me suspiciously. I was, at that moment, suffering from an almost unbearable curiosity to explore what lay beneath the doctor’s white coat.

  “Why are you smiling?” she asked, unsmilingly.

  “Because I’m happy. To be getting better. Under your care.”

  Dr. Fernández frowned, then smiled in a sly manner.

  “You know the man they brought in, the one who has been shouting the whole time?”

  “You mean the beast of 111?”

  “Precisely,” she answered, without flinching a facial muscle.

  “What of him?” I asked. “Has he pegged out?”

  “No. He has been moved to psychiatric care. His liver is ruined, and his mind with it.” She paused for maximum effect. “That, Señor Lucas, is how you will be in a few years’ time if you do not heed my advice.”

  She turned around and left, without awaiting a response.

  While I waited to get better, eating quantities of fish, fruit and yogurt, I was also learning a kind of resignation with respect to the Cathar sect, beginning to view it as a strange learning experience with no clear-cut benefits, but with little harm caused either. While I was not prepared to take it to the extreme that Eugenia had suggested and regard it as a disposable fiction, I had, after all, graduated with my l
ife intact, if not my love. But then the memory of the three weeks locked in the dark dungeon returned, and I could be left in no doubt that my captor’s intentions were of the most sinister kind.

  Lying in bed at night, once the acute phase of the pneumonia had passed, I stared at the window next to my bed, half-expecting to hear a tapping on the glass, and to see the face of the angel of Santa María del Mar beckoning me out onto the ledge: or else to see her suspended upside-down, bat-like, gesturing for me to follow her. I wondered whether the hospital was covered in any of the routes taken by the roof people, whether in fact they might have an encampment on top of this very building. As I grew stronger, the desire to drink began to leave me, though my craving for tobacco only increased, an addiction I attempted to satisfy in the television lounge, or else during walks in the foyer area of the hospital, and the bar. But smoking hurt my lungs, so I packed it in.

  Finally, one Saturday morning, after a final valedictory lecture from Dr. Fernández, I was discharged. I had been in the hospital for eighteen days. I stepped out into the early winter sunshine, and caught a taxi home.

  22. THE ART OF ASCENT

  During the course of my stay in hospital, I had resolved to do something about my mental inertia and my squandered finances. Both resolutions were addressed on my return to the flat in Santa Caterina. The mailbox contained a letter from my erstwhile employers, offering an extensive commission for some new translation work, along with payment for a piece of work I had long since given up on. Cheered by this, I climbed the stairs to the top floor, my breathing by no means back to normal. A change in lifestyle was in order: and if so, I reflected, as I entered the flat and surveyed the wreckage of my pre-hospital life, here was the place to start.

  There were empty brandy bottles littered around the living space, ashtrays and saucers overflowing with dog-ends, and a sharp and distressing smell from the kitchen that indicated the decay of something that had once been alive. At that point my doorbell rang, and I had to go down to the street door again, where I was greeted by the postwoman, who handed me a small registered package and asked me to sign for it.

  The package was cube-shaped and wrapped in brown paper. The sender’s address on the formal return slip was written in a neat black italic script and read Fundació Joan Miró. The name of the sender was Lluisa Navarra. I knew nobody of this name, nor indeed anyone who worked at the Miró Foundation. I held the package apprehensively. Its alleged place of origin was, at best, something intended to intrigue: at worst a provocation of some kind. I again tested the package carefully in my hands. It was not heavy, though perhaps heavy enough to contain a small explosive device. But I did not suspect for a moment that this was the case. My stay in hospital had made me sensitive, I thought, to death’s proximity. I was certain that whatever lay inside this package was not going to kill me.

  I returned breathlessly to my apartment and placed the package on the kitchen table. The brown paper was tightly taped, and once removed, revealed a layer of bubble-wrap, equally tight. I cut through this, only to find a third layer of wrapping: tightly bound parcel tape. It was difficult to find a loose end, as though the tape were one continuous strip. I prised the tape away, half-expecting a further layer of wrapping. Instead I discovered a plain box, painted silver-grey. It appeared to be wooden, but I was not certain of this. In the centre of the lid was an exquisitely intricate, multi-coloured patch of embroidery, embedded in the painted wood. The embroidered design suggested a setting sun.

  I lifted the lid, curiosity by now far exceeding apprehension. Peering inside I could make out two objects. I pulled the first one out. It was a sweet: an Italian chocolate to be precise, of a type called Sospiri. Sighs. My Italian stretched to that. I looked more closely at the label on the white wrapping. There was one other word, indicating, I supposed, the flavour of the sweet: mirto. I had an idea of what this might mean, but before searching my library I reached inside the box for its second hidden treasure, and pulled out a plastic model of a bull: a tawny, lifelike child’s toy, complete, I was pleased to observe, with co-jones fully intact. I held the bull in the palm of my hand and looked at it, wondering what, out of so many possibilities, it was intended to mean.

  Leaving the bull carefully on the table next to its box, I wandered into the living room and pulled the Italian dictionary from its place on the shelf. Mirto meant myrtle, a plant sacred to the goddess Venus.

  I returned to the kitchen. A plastic bull and a wrapped chocolate, whose content was blessed by the deity of love. A bull with balls: more, as I stared at its miniature painted eyes, a stubborn bull, stubbornness, along with patience, being the two most characteristic features of tauromachy. At the same time I remembered the Minotaur, half man, half bull; the guardian of the Cretan labyrinth, a creature outwitted by Theseus with the help of Ariadne’s thread. Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, who had elected to assist the Athenian youth, both of them fleeing the tyranny of her father and his labyrinthine palace.

  I made myself a cup of tea and sat looking at the contents of my package: the embroidered, painted box, the sweet, the bull. I looked at the name of the sender, but could think of nothing that linked me to anyone of this name. I considered who might have sent me such a gift, but there was only one real possibility: the provenance of the parcel and, above all, its contents, pointed to Nuria. Of this I was in no doubt at all. It was as if she had waited for this day before contacting me in an oblique and suggestive way, by means of a puzzle. But how could she have known that I would be at home just as the parcel was due to be delivered, unless she had in some way been surveying my movements all this time? She could hardly have engineered the postal delivery. The postwoman was genuine enough; I recognised her as our regular. And who was Lluisa Navarra?

  My speculations led me nowhere, and my apartment was still in need of attention. I rolled up my sleeves, retrieved a long-disused vacuum cleaner, a scrubbing brush and mop from the cupboard in the hallway, and piled everything disposable into plastic carrier bags. I then vacuumed everywhere, filled a bucket with hot water and detergent, and began to scrub. When I had finished in the living space and the bedroom, I began on the kitchen and bathroom. Last of all, I cleaned the veranda, again removing bottles and cigarette butts, before scrubbing and sluicing the whole area. I played Bach piano music on the stereo as I worked. When I had finished it was evening, and I was exhausted. I phoned for a taxi, put on my leather jacket and scarf, and rewarded myself with a meal in an upmarket vegetarian restaurant in Gràcia, washed down with a bottle of sparkling mineral water.

  In the middle of the night I woke up suddenly, with a sharp pain in the chest, at precisely the moment that the conundrum of the package’s sender revealed itself to me. “Lluisa Navarra” was simply an anagram.

  The following morning I phoned in at the editorial office where I had been offered work, and was told to collect the first manuscript at my convenience. The director there said that I had been missed.

  I was re-joining the human race. I still felt as though a part of me was adrift, floating on an infinitely deep dark sea, and that no amount of attending to the details of my daily life would protect me for long against the next squall, let alone any impending hurricane. At times I craved alcohol with an excruciating intensity, but my fear of being unable to stop once I had started was more persistent than the craving. A drink might salvage some temporary sense of well-being, but would, without a doubt, lead me back into the quagmire.

  I resisted sending a reply to the false name at the Miró Foundation: having begun several, I was unable to complete any of them. In any case, a letter would be unlikely to reach Nuria, since she had clearly invented the name and used that address to prevent my locating her. Short of hanging out at the foundation on the off-chance that she had taken up permanent residence in the lobby, I was going to have to let it go. If she was in Barcelona, I told myself, then we would meet when the time was right. Where finding Nuria was concerned, I could no more force the course of even
ts than I could avoid experiencing a tremor of excitement whenever the phone rang, or when checking my mailbox each morning. Crossing the road I scanned faces, in the vain hope that I would see her standing out in a faceless crowd, but soon I began to see her everywhere. I had no more news of her, and was inclined to think of her package as a kind of valediction, a parting gift. I mollified myself with platitudes: that time heals all wounds; that attempting to moderate my emotional responses would lead to a more peaceful life; even that the whole of the summer might just as well have been a dream, from which I could, if I was wise, learn something. None of this helped. I did all the right things: consumed pots of vitamin supplements, went to the gym, took long swims and steam baths, avoided tobacco and alcohol, and went to the cinema two or three times a week. One evening, after suffering an overwhelming desire to get drunk, I attended a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, but found myself incapable of saying anything of any meaning to this group of earnest and well-intentioned strangers.

  I read at night, since sleeping was a problem. I did not want to start taking prescribed medicines, so on Susie Serendipity’s advice took natural extract of valerian, ate oats and drank chamomile tea. None of these helped me sleep, but I began to relax a little. I had decided to read everything available about the Cathars. One book described everyday life in a Pyrenean Cathar village at the end of the thirteenth century, fifty years or so after Bernard Rocher’s supposed departure from Mélissac. I pitched what I read against the version I had received from Pontneuf concerning our previous incarnations as Cathars. I was left wondering how much of his teaching he had contrived through studying the era in detail, and how much was his own invention. It would not have been difficult for him to assemble a particular version of events, but I needed to know what, precisely, he had invented. I began working my way through everything available from standard booksellers about the Cathars, and was considering a visit to the university in order to get a visitor’s library card and pursue my reading further.